I went to a party last night at the Mohawk for the release of Austin Chronicle’s 30 year retrospective of the history of music in Austin. Chronicle OTR man and 101x Daily Doser Austin Powell was guest bartender and I also got a chance to briefly catch up with my old buddy Raoul Hernandez (and it is just plain crazy to think that he has been music editor there for 17 year).
Getting home last night and thumbing through the book, I have to admit that my first thought was…”where’s my stuff?”…because it’s all about me-me-me. But nope, none of the articles that I wrote during my time as a freelancer made the cut. And the truth is that none of them should have. I wrote a bunch of record reviews, SXSW previews, and live shots during that time. But the truth is that I only published a handful of major band profiles. Of those, only one–Dangerous Toys–would have been suitable for inclusion here, and Andy Langer’s later piece on Jason McMaster clearly does a better job of framing the group’s historical significance than did my in-the-moment discussion of a band trying to follow up a gold record and avoid the sophomore slump.
I only published one cover story…a 1992 piece about the absurdities of Austin’s noise ordinance. And perhaps my favorite piece was a first person shooter’s account of my misadventures in the metal underground that was published when the Back Room closed in 2006. You can read that story in the Austin Chronicle archives.
I really enjoyed thumbing through the book itself when I got home last night. It was definitely a trip down memory lane, and does a great job of framing the discussion of what happened in the early eighties, before I arrived, and during the 7 years I was stationed on dangerous foreign soil (okay, I mean Oklahoma).